If an Elephant stomps does anyone hear it? 2.0
Part 2
How ya doing?
Well, simple question, without a simple answer. Do I mean in this moment? This year? This life? Physically? Emotionally, Mentally? Does anyone really want the answer to this question? and if so, do I really want to answer it? As an in character Bruce Willis once asked Marcellus Wallace, “Are you Ok?”, “Nah man, I am pretty f’ing far from OK.”
Our family has been busy trying to emerge from the shadowlands of grief and build a New Life. The realization that the New Life is never going to be our Old Life is pretty much impossible to truly accept. Our loss of Maisa has ripped a hole in our perceived space/timeline. The Old Life that had Maisa in our tribe has been inexorably shifted to a new timeline. Every day brings comparative exercises in trying to figure out… What Maisa would think of this, or What would she say about this? I feel a bit in public like an apparition. Though, I recently heard someone else in grief explain going out in public as comparable to being out amongst the Muggles. Maisa read all the Harry Potter books multiple times, and this made me laugh. Though I feel more like Dobby than a wizard.
Animals Need Conductors
When I am overwhelmed, I often try to look for small perceptions, life’s graces and/or beauty and dive into MYopia. It has always been comforting to me in a way to use MYopia to peel back the layers of perception. Shift—> to the old timeline of sitting on the deck in blissful quiet with Maisa. Actually, a bit more like possessing a still mind, it isn’t actually quiet. When the layer gets peeled back the outside noise is a conglomerate of smaller noises. We notice the dog barking three blocks away, and another one closer. The sounds of cars. Kids playing. And the birds. Even the bird layer has different species all making their soul songs, singing to be heard. Different frequencies and patterns of the songs become apparent. Insects - chirping of crickets fiddling with their wings occupy a higher frequency. Maisa loves the songs of crickets. Probably because the songs of crickets are conducted without talking.
With all the kids so much into music, it was fascinating to learn how animals, insects, birds, all tend to operate at their own frequency bands. Pretty amazing that all these species are able to stake out their turf on the frequency spectrum without any license or input from the FCC. Shift—> old timeline we learned much about the auditory spectrum when we traveled to a science center in San Francisco over the summer. They had an exhibit called The Great Animal Orchestra by Bernie Krause. Maisa and Sawyer made themselves at home, sprawled out on the couches near the front of the exhibit while the rest of us perched in the back. It is difficult to really do the exhibit justice with words, but imagine a wall of sound combined with two screens and a water pool in front. The left screen marks the frequency by height, and the amplitude by horizontal width. The right screen is a historical time stamp. The reflecting pool (both sound and vision) catches the waves and is disrupted by the sound waves, and in its auditory distortion, also distorts the light that reflects off it.
The ability of creative humans to do creative things always amazes me. If only we were better at harnessing these creative gifts as a society then these gifts would not be crushed at their incipiency, buried under the sands of social norms and the divergent thought necessary to spawn creativity sent to Osiris. Bernie Krause followed his folly, walking away from the movie industry to become an expert in his special interest of capturing nature audio. If this is of interest, it is well worth tuning into their interactive website to explore the auditory spectrum in different biomes. Or at least the part that humans can even hear. There are worlds beyond our own perception.
Perception is Reality and Perception is a Spectrum
It is also possible to fragment the auditory spectrum between what makes the spectrum of sounds in our world. There are the sounds, some might say noise, that humans and things made by humans generate, the anthrophony. The auditory waves that are generated by other living things, the biophony. Lastly, natural noises by non-living phenomena, thunder, wind, is the geophony.
We as humans are limited by our tiny little ears. Like satellite dishes, these collagen flaps pick up auditory waves and focus them where their vibrations are felt and in turn processed by our much larger brain1. We, as humans, are very self-absorbed. Things are generally assumed not to exist unless we are able to perceive them. And even then we tend to only perceive them in an anthropocentric manner. We don’t question that when we hear booming thunder, we also feel it in our chest. The low frequencies that our tiny ears and brains just can’t process.
It is nigh impossible for us to imagine what it is like to be able to hear like a bat or a dolphin. These animals are so sound sensitive that they can ping their environment and build a map based on the sound waves being reflected back at them. Basically, they hear like we see with a flashlight in the dark. Which is why bats can hunt mosquitos or dolphins can’t escape their school with their mums pinging them annoyingly. Similarly who hasn’t had a dog that howls seemingly in distress (or just for fun) every time they hear a siren? This particular sound from the anthrophony clearly triggers something in our canine friends. The higher frequency of the sirens is a dog whistle that they perceive differently than we do.
Are some Humans more Dolphin(ish) than Others?
We as humans sort of natively understand that animals can hear differently than us. We don’t spend much time trying to understand their perceptive differences, but we acknowledge they exist. I have never tried to teach a bat or dolphin how to read a book with their eyes. Nor have I ever tried to teach a horse how to drink water using verbal instructions. I would like to know who taught that Corgi to ride a horse, though. Shift—> old timeline Maisa to me “Quit monologuing Dad! and get to the point” NOT ALL HUMANS EXPERIENCE THE WORLD THE SAME! We are all born with our own beautiful faces, personalities and smiles. We all have different abilities, strengths and what we (or society) might consider to be weaknesses. Some of us are even born with or develop disabilities2. The disabilities are literally the inability to do that which an abled person can do. Our brains are different. In each brain also comes a wide array (perhaps a spectrum) of differences in how that person processes information and perceives the world through the sensory apparatuses.
Time to check your homework. Did you watch the video at the end of Part 1? Where an autistic girl describes in detail (with animation) how her hypersensitivities cause her severe anxiety at school. And on the way to school. And at home. And generally.
If not, please try and watch it here as trying to describe sensory hypersensitivities with words, probably won’t do it justice. Many neurodivergent people (autistic and ADHDers), face severe hypersensitivities that cause them mental, physical and emotional pain from their heightened senses. These hypersensitivities and hyposensitivities (reduced sensitivity, like Covid did to smell in many) can cause our body to react or under react to sensory stimuli. Many would consider it an abnormal over or under reaction as it does not cause the same response in the body.
As an example, pretend about when you get in the car, you forget that you were blasting Wolf Totem while commuting home from work. Heavy metal Mongolian music is a coping strategy for traffic for you, but you forgot to turn the noise down before you shut the engine off. The next day, sleepy and groggy you get behind the wheel turn the key and are met with a sonic wall of noise from guttural screams, thrashing guitars and the box fiddle3. The sound causes a stress reaction in your body. The sound waves enter your ears and trigger the auditory complex in your brain => your amygdala activates and senses a threat => amygdala signals for the adrenal system to kickstart => your body releases cortisol => the cortisol increases heart rate, blood pressure, respiration and puts brain on high alert. It can be shockingly painful. To save a internet search => Wolf Totem turn it up to get full sensory experience!
Now Mongolian Metal would be cortisol producing to most all people, unless you are Mongol horde(r) of instruments. Imagine that instead of blaring loud music, many other common human generated anthrophony sounds from noisy hallways, school bells (whistles), announcements, children screaming or loud talking, background noises from fans, pencil clicking, sniffling, etc all cause a similar amount of distress. These sounds stimulate the fight of flight adrenal/cortisol response similar to the Mongolian Thrash Metal in the car. Or consider some other noise that evokes an extreme reaction. Nails on a chalkboard perhaps? Now imagine if a routine noise in your environment produced that kind of reaction. Repeatedly. On a daily basis. What if people talking over each other felt like nails on a chalkboard, and also sounds of car engines, and school bells, and coughing or sneezing. (These are only noises. I haven’t even gotten to other sensory items, such as lights or smells yet.) This is a very small insight into some of the sensory issues many autistic and ADHD kids face at school, most of which go unnoticed and unaccommodated.
How many times would it take from living in this hell before you “give up” on trying to accommodate or find relief from the pain and your body takes longer and longer to return to homeostatic levels of flight/fight hormones. The body basically can just get stuck in fight/flight with elevated cortisol levels. Is it anxiety? or is it that the environment (school, city, workplace) has painful stimuli, causing a cascading adrenal response? How many times do you think the children get told that their perception is not real, that they are too sensitive, that their pain is not valid, that they are hypochondriacs? It would be invalidating as these sensory sensitivities (or in some cases insensitivities) are caused by brain differences. All this damage because we assume that there isn’t a spectrum of perception caused by a rarer neurotype and sensory profile than is closer to the median (the perceptual norm). Think how damaging this would be, how much externalized and internalized physical, mental and emotional harm this might cause.
It seems so much easier for people to accept that a child with a congenital hearing defect, can’t hear. They need to be taught in different manner and with different learned compensation strategies and supports. Similarly, it seems much easier to accept for able people that a paralyzed person is going to have a hell of time navigating a flight of stairs. That isn’t saying that their physical disabilities are accommodated well, but just that it is easier for people to perceive their difficulties.
To be continued…yes I will need to talk about elephants at some point. But do any of you have sensory sensitivities that are hard for many to understand? Let’s hear them! The weirder the better.
Just because we have a large brain does not mean that we actually use it. I was going to make a TikTok explaining this phenomena, but found myself distracted looking at some Corgi that would sneak out and ride a small pony.
Dis (from disabled) is derived from Latin and means ‘not, the reverse of’. Not abled. Ableism is the societal perception and assumption that disabled people should be able to just cope and do the things that might come fairly easily to their able bodies (or minds).
In yet another sign of cultural appropriation, the box fiddle, or as Maisa would call it the stupid box fiddle is commonly known as the horse head fiddle or the Morin khuur in the common tongue.
As a bird song listener, yes, the birds provide a whole new layer to the human experience. Well explained. And your explanation of sensory differences, combined with the Part 1 animation, are compelling and familiar. Thanks for putting words to digital paper to bring understanding.